‘All of which,’ Radclyffe continues, ‘I suspect would not have bothered the Yanks one whit if they hadn’t discovered that there were thirty children of American-German engineers being held in the camps there, and God alone knew what the looters were going to do next. The 102nd Infantry moved in, shot the odd looter to show they meant business, these Yanks look after their own. The children were discovered to be all in one piece, and the next morning there were two hundred US troops with Sherman tanks occupying the place.’
♦
‘Don’t be silly,’ said the woman. ‘Marilyn’s under lock and key, had her allowance stopped.’
Ishmael’s worst fears were confirmed.
‘And can you be surprised? Running around the country dressed like a harlot. Research she calls it. I’d give her research if she was a daughter of mine.’
‘Is that Marilyn’s room at the end there?’
‘No, it’s that one there.’
The woman pointed briefly to a dormer window set high amid eaves and chimneys. It looked impregnable.
‘Here, I shouldn’t have told you that. I suppose you think you’re smart. What’s your game, anyway?’
‘I’m here for Marilyn.’
‘Let’s not go through it all again, love. You can’t see Marilyn because she’s confined to her room and you can’t see her Dad because he’s not here. I can ask the lady of the house if she’ll see you, but I don’t know that she will, and if she isn’t willing to see you I’ll have to ask you to park your Volkswagen elsewhere.’
‘Hey,’ said Davey. ‘We’re on a mercy errand. We park where we want to park.’
‘Do you? I’ll give you mercy errand.’
‘Please, please,’ Ishmael said, ‘let’s stay rational. All right, yes, I would be prepared to talk to Marilyn’s mother if she has the time, if it’s at all convenient, please.’
‘Now that’s a much nicer way of talking to people.’
‘Thank you,’ said Ishmael.
It was a mistake.
♦
‘And all I can say is, thank God the Americans got there before the Russians did. As things are Wolfsburg lies four kilometres from the border with the Russian Zone, and such are the vagaries of war, Hirst, that despite the fact that the Americans captured the place they’ve handed it over to us and now it’s in the British Zone.’
‘Sounds like a good thing, sir.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Sir?’
♦
Marilyn’s mother received Ishmael in the library. It seemed ironic, yet appropriate. She insisted on talking to him alone. Davey had to wait in the kitchen.
She was wearing a blue velour tracksuit, high heels and a lot of gold jewellery. Her hair and face firmly in place. It wasn’t the natural look, but Ishmael supposed it was all right. She was a good-looking woman in her way. Like mother, like daughter, Ishmael mused.
She was standing in the library with a copy of The Boys from Brazil in one hand and a large glass in the other. Ishmael couldn’t tell what was in the glass but from the way she treated it it was precious, it was alcoholic, and there was plenty of it. She didn’t offer Ishmael any of it.
‘Is Ishmael your real name?’
‘It’s real enough.’
‘Marilyn’s told us so much about you. We did rather seem to get off on the wrong foot last time.’
Ishmael relived the hammer hitting him in the groin.
‘Rather.’
‘We do worry about Marilyn.’
‘You think I don’t?’
‘I suspect you do, but hardly in the same way, I feel.’
‘I think my feelings are likely to be superior to any of yours, madam.’
Marilyn’s mother dropped her glass. It smashed. Ice cubes, drink, a slice of lemon and splinters of glass bounced around on the polished wood floor.
‘Would you be an angel and pick that up for me, Ishmael?’
He didn’t see how he could refuse. He knelt and started gathering the debris.
‘You are kind,’ she said.
Then she clubbed him over the head with a soda syphon.
♦
Radclyffe says, ‘We’ve just bombed the factory into absolute buggery. But, frankly, it’s the only decent bit of vehicle plant that we British have got. Oh yes, the bloody Americans carved it up very nicely for themselves. The American Zone just happens to contain the Mercedes, the Opel and the BMW factories, while the Russian Zone also has a BMW factory and an Auto Union plant at Zwickau.
‘We’re left with a more than half-bombed factory, and a pretty half-baked prototype.’
‘I don’t think, with respect, that you’re being quite fair, sir. The prototype seems viable enough. They certainly seemed to be quite acceptable as war vehicles. Damned sturdy little beasts they are too, I’d say.’
Colonel Radclyffe allows himself a smile of gentle satisfaction.
‘I see,’ he says. ‘So you know a good deal more about these vehicles than you were prepared to admit.’
♦
Things moved rather rapidly for Ishmael, though he was in no state to be aware of the fact. He wasn’t even conscious for some of it.
He felt the blow on the back of the head and more or less passed out, though he did have certain memories of various kinds of pain being inflicted on him while he was on the floor of the library so the unconsciousness could not have been absolute. Then he was outside the house and Marilyn’s mother was attacking Enlightenment with a fierce and drunken passion. She had a sledge-hammer which she used to telling effect on every panel of the car. Pieces of chrome and glass showered from it. She had some trouble smashing the windscreen, but not too much trouble.
Ishmael saw this wrecking through a haze of concussion, and then he was bundled behind the wheel. There was much screaming along the lines of ‘Never darken my doorstep again’ and as a parting shot Marilyn’s mother called Ishmael a sexual inadequate which he thought was unnecessary and unfair.
She returned to the house and slammed the door behind her. She probably needed a drink.
♦
‘Only an interested layman’s knowledge, sir,’ says Hirst. ‘Honestly.’
‘So, Hirst, what we have is a prototype which you are obviously rather enthusiastic about and obviously think is viable, a factory as described, and a gang of crazed POWs. Though, of course, they’re ‘Displaced Persons’ now. And this is precisely where you come in.’
♦
The servant woman who had been watching the show came over to the car to speak to Ishmael. He had no need to wind down a window, Marilyn’s mother had smashed that too.
‘You really ought to be getting along now, don’t you think?’ said the woman.
Ishmael agreed.
And then he heard the tyres of a Rolls-Royce turning into the drive. It was Marilyn’s father. Ishmael was filled with remorse. If only he had waited. If only he hadn’t rushed into a quick and futile confrontation with Marilyn’s mother.
Still he was not defeated. He threw open the door of Enlightenment and crossed unsteadily to the Rolls. Marilyn’s father stepped out of his car.
‘You again,’ he said.
‘Me,’ said Ishmael.
Ishmael put out his hand. Marilyn’s father more or less shook it. Ishmael knew he had to speak, to speak eloquently and boldly, to strike a man’s heart and to change that man’s mind.
‘Sir,’ he began. ‘May I call you sir? I want from you something that is the richest prize a man can have, and yet a prize that no man can own. I speak of Marilyn. And please don’t think I want to take her away from you, at least not emotionally. She will be with you always, in your heart and mind, and you in hers, if you let her be free to find her secret self…’
Marilyn’s father wasn’t especially attentive through most of the speech. He went to the boot of his car and started to take something out of it. Ishmael felt his audience slipping away from him.